The Seagate Barracuda series of Hard Disks have been going for quite some time now, but they keep reinventing the hardware behind the name to keep it up with the times. Recently I bought a new 80Gb disk, after realising that my 10Gb one was simply not big enough for everything I wanted to install.
So off I trudged to the Novatech website, where I purchased the Seagate Barracuda 80Gb Snowman Series hard disk, for a very nice sum of £151 including delivery. I choose it because at the end of the day, I was fed up with slow, small disk drives, so was after the fastest available for the IDE/ATA interface. And this appeared to be it.
It has a sizeable 2Mb buffer, which is 4 times the size that most other drives offer. The drives spins at 7,200 rpm, with a quoted access time of 7.9ms. Again, both these seemed pretty good, as most other drives were 5,600 rpm and 8.9ms, clearly slower. I didn`t know whether I`d notice the difference, since I have no newish drives to compare it against, but I certainly can`t complain about the speed, as everything loads much more quickly than it used to (though that may be partly due to the Win2K operating system which I loaded onto it, whereas I was running Win98SE before).
Also, one of the major deciding factors in my choice was the sound level. On many of my older computers, the HDD could get very noisy when it was in high demand by the system, and didn`t want to be faced with turning my speakers up louder just to muffle the sound of my new drive. No problem with this one, as it is reportedly one of the quietest drives on the market. The final deciding factor had to be the price and the brand name. I couldn`t really find any other drives with these performance figures for a similar price, plus the drive I was replacing was a Seagate, which had run trouble free with no errors for the past three years, quite impressive when you learn that about six times a year it was hurled into the back of my car for a 60 miles t rip between home and University, along bumpy country lanes. So I was happy with Seagate`s reliability, and so far while I have only had this one for a month, it has so far proved trouble free.
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